Republicans sour on free trade, see drag on U.S. economy, job losses

The one clear casualty of the presidential race is free trade.

Amid all the other ideological fights between Democrats and Republicans, a consensus has emerged in exit polling that voters see free trade as an economic drag on the U.S., costing American jobs.

Most striking of all is that the opposition within the Republican Party is even higher than among Democrats, who, in Washington’s conventional wisdom, and thanks to their deep ties with labor unions, have traditionally been seen as the free trade opponents.

In Wisconsin on Tuesday, only a third of voters in the Republican primary said free trade spawns American jobs. A staggering 54 percent said the reverse. Among voters in the Democratic primary, the numbers were split, with 41 percent saying free trade helps jobs and 42 percent saying it costs the country jobs. Similar results have played out in both parties in states including Illinois and Mississippi.

“Americans’ attitudes toward trade are becoming more protectionist in large part because of how broad have been the downward pressures on Americans’ earnings in recent years — regardless of their political party,” said Matthew J. Slaughter, dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

The tough economic times and a ready target in trade have pushed both parties’ presidential fields toward protectionism, with four of the five remaining candidates opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the massive 12-nation deal that President Obama signed but has yet to submit to Congress for final approval.

Businessman Donald Trump, who is leading the Republican race, has threatened to rip up not only the TPP but also previous deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement. That has forced Sen. Ted Cruz, his closest competitor and the winner of Wisconsin’s primary on Tuesday, to adopt a stiffer stance on the issue.

In the Democratic race, Sen. Bernard Sanders has made his opposition to trade deals over the past two decades a chief selling point, and front-runner Hillary Clinton has played a feverish game of catch-up, recanting her previous glowing praise for TPP as a secretary of state and now saying the deal signed by her former boss, Mr. Obama, falls short.

Still, she has been stunned by how well Mr. Sanders has wielded the issue against her.

“We need a president who doesn’t just rail against trade. We need a president who knows how to compete against the rest of the world and win,” she said in a Twitter post Wednesday after Mr. Sanders won the Democratic primary in Wisconsin.

Only Ohio Gov. John Kasich, trailing badly in the Republican race, remains a defender of the TPP.

Economists can calculate the benefits to the overall U.S. economy from trade and say there is little question that it does help. But that does little to comfort those who lose out, and those are the voices to which the candidates are responding.

“Historically, trade is always a hard sell in difficult times. The costs are concentrated and salient. The benefits are more widely spread and the links to trade are not as transparent,” said Gene M. Grossman, a Princeton University professor who has studied the politics of trade. “What’s needed in such times is leadership from some with a longer horizon and broader vision. Alas, such leaders seem to be in short supply these days.”

The near-uniform opposition at the top of the ticket this year could doom the chances for trade deals for years to come — though some analysts said there is a brief opening this year, with both Mr. Obama and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan supporters of a deal while still in office and seeing their window of opportunity closing.

“My hope is that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell somehow figure out how to get this passed during an Obama presidency,” said Simon Rosenberg, a longtime trade supporter who founded NDN, a center-left think tank.

That Democrats are conflicted on trade has long been apparent in Washington, where the party has experienced deep rifts. But Republican voters’ aversion is striking given the near-monolithic support for free trade agreements by the party’s officeholders in Washington.

In the vote last year to grant Mr. Obama fast-track powers to negotiate trade deals — the most recent test of free trade — nearly 80 percent of House Republicans voted in favor, as did 90 percent of Senate Republicans.

Since then, as the presidential campaign has intensified, so has opposition among Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who voted for the fast-track powers, now says he has serious questions about the TPP deal reached with those powers.

He has told Mr. Obama not to submit the deal until after the elections, leaving a lame-duck Congress as the only chance for passage.

Mr. Rosenberg says the Republican opposition isn’t that surprising. Indeed, he said it’s been Democrats who have advanced every major trade deal of the last century, going back to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, who set the ground for the liberalized international system.

More recently, he said, NAFTA, the creation of the World Trade Organization out of the Uruguay round of talks in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and normalized trade relations with China were all Democratic priorities. And Mr. Obama, not President George W. Bush, completed the TPP.

“The truth is the heavy lifting on trade has been done by Democrats, and the Republicans haven’t been nearly as involved in putting together the deals and the legislative pieces to get these done in the way Democrats have,” Mr. Rosenberg said.